Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

Part of what I'm doing puts me knee-deep in Atalasoft ImageCommands.  I was staring at some results of TintGrayscale and wondered how easy it would be to make the kind of 3D images that are a combined red and blue images with Atalasoft dotImage. Turns out, it's really easy.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Take two pictures of a subject with the camera shifted three inches horizontally.

2. Turn both images to grayscale

AtalaImage left = new AtalaImage(_leftName);
left = left.GetChangedPixelFormat(PixelFormat.Pixel8bppGrayscale);

AtalaImage right = new AtalaImage(_rightName);
right = right.GetChangedPixelFormat(PixelFormat.Pixel8bppGrayscale);

3. Make a third image that uses AtalaImage.CombineChannels where the left image is in channels one and two, and the right image is in channel three.

_combinedChannelsImg = AtalaImage.CombineChannels(
       PixelFormat.Pixel24bppBgr, new AtalaImage[] { left, left, right });

4. Use ShiftChannelsCommand to correct for any offset errors that may have been introduced when the pictures were taken.

ShiftChannelsCommand lscc = new ShiftChannelsCommand(-hstep, -vstep, 
         ChannelFlags.Channel3, 127);
ShiftChannelsCommand rscc = new ShiftChannelsCommand(hstep, vstep, 
         ChannelFlags.Channel1 | ChannelFlags.Channel2, 127);         _combinedChannelsAndShiftedImg =
         lscc.ApplyToImage(_combinedChannelsImg);
_combinedChannelsAndShiftedImg = 
         rscc.ApplyToImage(_combinedChannelsAndShiftedImg);

If you want to run an application built on this code, download the zip attached at the bottom of this post. I've included a left and right image of our lounge in the zip to play with (Now supports .NET 1.1).

1. Click in the top left box and pick your left image
2. Click the top right box and pick your right image.
3. Click the Combine button.
4. Use the sliders if adjust the position of the channels if your originals aren't aligned well (shouldn't be necessary for the lounge pictures).
5. Click on the combined image to save it.
   

You need 3D glasses to see the effect (right eye red, left eye blue).

Update: The resulting image